Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Social Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Freedom and Society
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy
Government and the Separation of Powers
National Longevity and Moral Virtue
Summary
Analysis
Rousseau contends that, if a government adds more magistrates (administrators) without the state growing, each magistrate starts getting power and the government as a whole grows weaker because it expends more of its power on internal affairs. Indeed, a magistrate has “three essentially different wills”: the self-interested personal will, the “corporate will” of the government, and the sovereign (or the people’s) will. While in theory a magistrate should let the sovereign will dominate their decision-making, in practice, it is the opposite: the personal will is strongest, since people are self-interested. So as the number of magistrates grows, the power of each magistrate’s personal will shrinks, and because “the exercise of power depends on the degree of will,” a government with more magistrates becomes less dominated by personal will and therefore less “active” (or powerful, relative to the sovereign and the subjects).
Crucially, Rousseau thinks that, as the government stays the same size, its “amount of activity” increases if its number of officials decreases. This is because a smaller group of officials will make decisions more efficiently. Importantly, the number of magistrates or administrators is not the same as the size of the government. Rather, Rousseau is talking about how hierarchical the government is. So a more hierarchical government (with fewer people at the top) will be more efficient but less precise in carrying out the people’s will. Rousseau’s taxonomy of the three wills is just another way of making this point: the magistrates’ personal will gets more influence when there are fewer magistrates. In other words, Rousseau turns the common logic on its head: efficient governments are more likely to be corrupt, and inefficient bureaucracies are more likely to actually carry out the people’s will (even though they do it very slowly).
Themes
Therefore, Rousseau concludes that it is possible to change the role of the government relative to the sovereign and the subjects by changing its number of magistrates. In the previous chapter, he argued that government needs more “repressive force” the bigger its population grows. Therefore, he concludes, governments need fewer magistrates per unit of population when the population is large than when it is small, as having fewer magistrates creates a stronger government based more on the personal will. But having more magistrates creates better “quality” decisions, which are closer to the sovereign general will. So government is a balancing act between ensuring a sufficiently strong government (fewer magistrates) and getting as close as possible to the general will (more magistrates).
Rousseau returns to his argument from the previous chapter: the government can serve to balance power between the two aspects of the people (the sovereign and the subjects). Now, it is clearer why he thinks that government should not grow as fast as the population: government actually becomes stronger when there are fewer people in charge. At the same time, the fact that smaller states can afford to have more magistrates and a more involved political decision-making process suggests that these smaller states ultimately produce better outcomes. While larger states are more powerful and their policies have a greater impact because they are more far-reaching, smaller states generally put better policies in place. And it is worth noting again that these two forms of government are not mutually exclusive: in fact, this is why most contemporary states function with overlapping jurisdictions on national, local, and sometimes also provincial or state levels.
Themes
